It might be interesting to anyone who reads my work to know where I got most of my experience talking with people. I have a high volume juice bar. I had a chain of eighty-five of them, and now I have one very busy store. I talk to people in depth about their lives, and it is genuinely interesting to me. I think it is a good proposition to find the people who are interested and really try to make a difference for them. That is the work of a juice bar owner.
It can be systemized. You write pamphlets. You write blogs. You put information into a podcast, onto the signs, anywhere you can be of service you try to be, and you blend it into the background so the people who do not want it never feel preached to. And the personality is sharp, which means that if someone does feel preached to, too fucking bad. That is what I might want to do. If I am serving the cheesecake, I might want to tell you something positive, or something important about the way we think.
Why am I like that? I do not know. I am a disruptor. I suppose I am an asshole. I am tough. I am working on this material for myself first, and I think it is important.
I think that when we reach a certain age our value to humanity becomes something that probably evolved over a very long period of time, which is that the elders were supposed to teach young people how to think, how to be, how to act toward others. You can learn from example. Even if you are reading a book by a serial killer who is apologizing and telling you how he got to be so sick, if it is an honest appraisal there is something educational in it. There is something to learn about life from people who have failed at it in many ways. I have also succeeded in many ways, in a greater amount, and I am grateful for that.
If there is one thing I have learned about people, from all over the country, from the desert to the suburbs to the big cities, across different cultures, it is this. People can finally identify with the word anxiety. It took generations of not even knowing what it was, then more generations struggling to get past the shame of it. Now we understand that the anxiety we all carry is part of the design of the human.
I write about it constantly and I study it as much as I can, and I know the subject is enormous. Anyone who reads my work who is also a student of the subject knows that I might be right about a lot of what I say, and that I am probably going to be wrong about some of it too. As long as I am right most of the time, and as long as what I am wrong about is trivial, I am a good teacher.